The games closed beta ran smoothly, I noticed very few major errors though the server stability wasn’t trust worthy. Like many closed beta’s, there are crashes, but thats what a closed beta is for. The community was nice, and the game is so polished I forgot that I was playing a closed beta;Yet there is going to be even MORE content! More classes, more environments, the idea has me giddy! This is a detailed review but I feel I should ask you to remember that in the future theres going to be at least 3 more classes. Lets get right into it then.

Storyline

The storyline is simple but well delivered. It has you purifying the land of all evil. The dark power is causing for the peaceful races to grow irritable, powerful, evil. Even killed humans have been ressurected by the evil power and turned into evil ghostly knights. These minions of evil go on to trap poor little souls which you rescue for your use. I like the presentation because the story takes itself seriously. It’s a little different for all the classes but follows the basic path of: A cool looking female NPC leads you on your journey to destroy the darkness while simultaously getting into occasional skirmishes with the other two not evil clans.

GAMEPLAY

Character control

The game plays about reflexes and timing. Click in the direction you want to attack. You attack in combos of 5. The combo changes if your moving while you attack. You press the 1 through 6 keys to select the skill you want to use and you right click to use a skill, and you can dodge attacks with the space key. When I finally got in and got a chance to fight the first thing I thought was “The game could survive on these mechanics alone!”

I had the most fun learning to use my Souls. The name of the game is Soul Master. Using Souls is simple. With one click of the F key, all your souls rush to you, then, simply click the area you want them to go to and they’ll attack everything near by. As a priest, I used my souls to tank for me. If you have enough souls you can have them kill a monster while you go off and worry about another. If you call your souls to you and Right click they’ll use a skill. Soul Skills are very powerful, and if you have enough souls and you place an attack well enough you can even do significant damage to a boss! You get souls that are trapped by monsters, or by summoning them from buildings.

From buildings you can summon Souls. Building a building is easy, but first you need seeds. When you defeat monsters, they’re often harboring a corrupted seed. You can purify this seed, and once you do it turns into a cauldron that will give you seeds continuously until destroyed by monsters or players. Seeds are used as a currency for creating buildings and summoning souls from them. I had so much fun just figuring out how easy it was to create a building. It all just felt natural. You simply click Z, this opens up the building menu, then click the key of the building you want to build. Summoning souls is just as easy, you click X, then click the key of the soul you’d like to summon! It’s so simple I do it while fighting!

Overall

Now we get to the good stuff. You know the gameplay is good when I could party on a hard mission over, and over, and over again. The gameplay is picture perfect and, honestly, if you can’t tell by now, I have never played anything like it. The character you play controls like an action rpg. The RTS aspects are so well implemented I felt like it was natural! Think League of Legends where you can control the minions. The levels are all designed differently. Some are made linear, some like Arena’s, all are fun. I was playing with a party once and we failed miserably at a mission you had to fight a Player Character like NPC. It was set up like a cross so we decided to all stay back in the ends and charge when we all had as many souls as possible. It was perfect! We defeated her without a death that time! That goes to show: A little bit of thought and team work goes a long way, and that’s saying a lot for any online game. The catch if you can deal with it is that the game is totally instanced. Don’t expect anything open worldish, like Divine Souls, Dungeon and Fighter, or Lunia.

Gameplay Score: 4/5. Yeah, it’s borderline flawless.

PVP

There were alot of hackers. Because of a fair dose of hard, cold, complaining, a GM posted on a forum about hacks that they might change the much hated hacker guard system they’re using right now. With that said, I enjoyed the good matches I had. It was all about getting the most minions and working with your team. If you can’t do that, you can’t win. Some fights felt ridiculously one sided. Theres alot of maps to play at, each of which is different in shape and environment.

Full SizeSoul Master Screenshot

PVP Score: 3/5 (It really should be higher after closed beta if theres less hackers)

Character Growth and Customization

As important a part as it is of any MMORPG or RPG at all. This is where Soul Master is lacking. The character growth is simple, strait forward. The level 14 knight to your left is the same as the level 14 knight to the right. You upgrade your skills but theres only so many skills to upgrade. However, I will shove down your through every now and again that this is a closed beta and more is expected to come……. but I don’t see more skills being one of those things. As for customization, in the end, you can only change your characters hair color. And classes are sex locked. Games have their short comings, soul masters are here.

Knight Customization

Beast Customization

Graphics, Design, and Presentation

Oh I don’t even know where to start. The Lush environments or the detailed characters? I love everything about this games graphics. It’s colorful and pleasing from start to finish. From the opening tutorial to the main town to lush gardens and forest to the insides of volcanoes, the game is vibrant. Fittingly as colorful as their backgrounds are the perfectly crafted anime styled characters. The style and quality makes the game feel like a console game. I think I’m in love with the character designer behind this game. I can’t say just how good some of these characters look. Heck, I went up to the weapon shop NPC and looked at the NPC for about 6 minutes. A priest in a nice dress ran past me and I got inspired to draw! Thats how good these characters look. But see for yourself, I implore you to atleast look at some of these screenshots in full screen.

Presenation Score: 4.5/5

A side note about attitude:

A BIG part of me loving this game is how seriously it takes itself! Plenty of anime styled MMOS have bored me simply because they, for some reason, think they have to be ridiculous. I don’t *WANT* to fight poop (I’m looking at you windy slayer) I don’t WANT to do quest for a guy with googly glasses. I CERTAINLY don’t want to fight with a giant fish (you MMOS know who you are). Just because it’s cute doesn’t mean you won’t be fighting dragons and orcs right off the bat.

Overall Game

The game is amazing. The lush world actually inspired me as an anime artist enough times, the beast in the world arn’t the cute cudly or silly’type you often get from a game in this style. The game is short as of now but we can expect more missions, more classes, more everything. With gameplay that is both challenging, rewarding, and simple to learn, the game is playable for everybody. If I had one game to play this year so far, it would be this. I Hope that all fans of action RPG games and RTS games like DOTA come and give this a try.

Pros: Cons:
Great graphics Pvp can feel one sided
Takes it’s world seriously Mediocre character cusomization
Very simple learning curve Few character growth options
Not to hard or easy
Above par music

Character growth: 2.5/5
Gameplay: 5/5
PVP: 3/5
Graphics: 4.5/5
GAME SCORE: 4/5

The footage demonstrates epic in-game clashes of WWII era armored fighting vehicles giving a glimpse inside medium tanks’ tactics in battle! and highlights combat characteristics of legendary T-44, VK 3002 (DB) and Panther units.

Medium tanks perform a wide array of task on the battlefield that range from protecting artillery and convoying allied units to staging instant flank attacks and capturing the enemy base being the main assault power of the team.

“Tanks like T-44 or Panther are jacks-of-all-trades in the game, “says Nick Katselapov, producer of World of Tanks.”They are fast, maneuverable and have decent firepower what makes them ideal for performing both defensive and offensive objectives.”

When our ancient continent was gradually eroded by demons, we started the game and formed of members of Alliance or Horde. Through studying skills and recruiting army, we will be bound to expand our force, resist evils from invasion, and expel evils out of this ancient world and recover the peace and stability ultimately.

Of course, whether you are a boy or girl, you always have hero dream, and WoL will pave the way for you. In terms of race selecting, except Alliance and Horde provided by WoL, there are two lord figures. One is male, the other is female. Do not worry about the distinguishment between each racial figure. The difference is just reflected in name and lord’s avatar. So your selection will not affect other game effects.

Once you select to be a lord, the first thing for you to know is the whole situation of this game by various tasks and then make sure your own responsibilities and quests. Apart from that, through finishing these quests, you can obtain abundant resources and gold as rewards. Only when you have enough resources and gold, you are able to keep establishing you own territory and kingdom. So for the players who play WoL for the first time, do not ignore Expansion Quests.

Once you have enough resources and coins, you can begin the first step of counterattacking evils– to construct your own castle or territory. In WoL, a lord can build different constructions and upgrade them. Different races built constructions of different styles. For example, the construction for headquarters is Political Center in the alliance. While in the horde, the counterpart construction is Chieftain Palace. Although the same sort of construction acts as different appearance, the function is similar. Political Center and Chieftain Palace are all used to manage your castle affairs. With the upgrading of constructions, the players have power to train more high soldiers. And the style of constructions also will become more gorgeous or grandiose.

The next key step is to recruit soldiers and wage battles. In WoL, each race has three heroes. Besides this, a lord also can recruit eight different kinds of units. Recruiting units is engaged in the barracks. A Lv1 barracks can recruit one group of units simultaneously. Different units hold different stats and features. So the key point of successful expedition is to know whether the units can support or impale each other.

Now it’s time for expedition which is a most expected action to heroes. When you lead your well-trained army out of castle, the glory of hero begins to approach you. Hero is a core role of wit and bravery forever. During the process of fighting, you must apply tactics to annihilate more enemies with less force.

What’s to be done if you lose the game? We all know failure teaches success. Only going through failure, you will draw experience and lesson. So even suffering defeat, you still can reorganize your army and fight again. Every hero is welcomed to return with or without triumph in WoL!

Distributed in “Free to Play,” Heroes of Three Kingdoms will immerse the player in the heart of China’s major wars between the kingdoms of Wei, Shu and Wu (each representing one of the factions in the game) and restores some of the famous battles Chinese history (such as the Battle of Red Cliffs, remained in history as one of the biggest killers in China).

Beyond its content and its PvP battlegrounds, HoTK is also distinguished by its social components: the player is invited to gain reputation and progress within the gaming community to win trophies and unlock new content.
So many components to discover today in the open beta test of Western MMO, then.

The game graphics are on a decent level but nowhere near any visual extremes. It feels a bit immersive and then cut short. The animations are very smooth and the game conserves memory, so there is little fear of crashing a graphics card. Everything meshes correctly and you don’t have to deal with the visual oddity of visible mesh-lines like in some other games. Pleasantly, there are no graphical mess-ups and the visuals feel fluid. There are no particle effects or anything of the like. Its graphics are somewhat refreshing, but that is quickly cut off by the bad camera angles that can block your view of your own players making for a sometimes-aggravating experience.

The Ambient sounds are better than some I have come across in gaming but are not amazing or innovative. First off, you have the announcer: he has an Australian accent, which is good quality, but they didn’t record too many different things for him to say, so the voice becomes redundant rather quickly. The announcer has a reaction for everything, but only one type of reaction for each thing for the most part, leaving little to be surprised by. The sound effects are admirable, except for the fact that some things you would expect to have a larger reaction instead barely make a sound. When you violently attack, trying to get the soccer ball there should be a sound of crunching or a grunt of pain at least. There are some realistic ambient sounds for actions and few other things. There is some barely noticeable music that almost seems to be there for the sole purpose of altering your mood, as its barely perceivable over the other sounds in game, thus not of a level for general music appreciation. The sound is more of a background thing besides crowd cheering and the announcer, but overall it’s pretty solid. I still see it as having potential and hope the programmers get back to working on it soon.

There are a lot of betas that almost have no chance at all, but this is one of the few I have seen in a while that actually may have some good potential, although sports games are easy to make, and thus tend to flood the market making their odds of getting played slighter. I still think this is a decent game. But it has more to evolve game play and graphics wise. I believe FIFA will become slightly intuitive and actually stand up to some of the other games out there. This game is along the lines of a good time waster, but not a waste of their time to make.

Game play:5.6/10

Graphics:3.4/10

Music and Sounds:4.5/10

Overall(not an average):4.9/10

However, we would like to tell you that the Chinese version of Dragon Nest has just entered open beta testing in China, and this super mmo is being published by Shanda.

Curious and interested in Dragon Nest? you can download the game client and create an account at the official Chinese website.

Dragon Nest is presented as an Action MMORPG, PvP oriented. The game promises dynamic combat during which you will not “click and wait”. Dragon Nest also promises scalable territories (the monsters will appear randomly), guild wars, or the ability to change into dragons for the most powerful figures.

Meet Cute Monster Girl; Experience the ever best gameplay, fight monsters that harbored disgusting plots of getting rid of you.

You can easily play this browser game if you have a relatively clear understanding of how World of Warcraft MMORPG worked, even if you do not get hang of something that are materialized, like virtual items and equipment. Time to thwart your opponents and explore the dungeon on your web browser. Transform your character as you gather dropped items.

Here, no modern helicopters, no AK 47, and aircraft with jamming equipment, but magical weapons that could caused an unprecedented damage, as well as striking defensive equipment like Dragon’s call.

Blood spurts from enemies, right where your twin blades sliced. Enemies fall, only to become corpses you can hoist and brandish as sadistic weapons. Watch as walls crumble and whole buildings topple, providing you with new toys in the battlefield. With Source Engine physics and destructible, interactive environments, Vindictus redefines everything you thought you knew about “free-to-play.”

When a spider three times your height skitters toward you, you’ll want one party member to whip a chain around its legs to pin it in place and another to distract it by flinging debris from a nearby pile of rubble, all so you can sneak behind and unleash insane damage with your blade. On the sidelines, your final party member casts healing spells. Dungeons change each time you enter them, so you’ll never get bored.

Next, personalize your newly crafted gear with stats via the Enchant system and color via the Dye system. In the end, your character will be clad in gear that’s powerful, stylish, and unique. Just be careful when picking your undergarments — too much fighting can break your gear, revealing what you’re wearing underneath!

The Vega star system is where new players start their exciting foray in the Pirate Galaxy universe. Combining a compelling story with over 40 new highly crafted missions and new exotic planet designs, the new Vega system is now on a par with the galaxy’s later star systems.

In addition to overhauled content, the user interface has been streamlined and modernized, with improved chatroom facilitates, direct player support system and a new polished layout. The user interface is now more comfortable to use and displays all relevant information to the player whilst remaining clean and uncluttered.

Furthermore, new ship designs, additional PvP clan based conquest planets and many gameplay improvements have been added to further enhance the player experience.

What can I really say about tanks? First – I don’t like them. In fact I don’t like anything related to World War II very much. Games about WWII and machinery from that period come together as two of the most unappealing things in the world. Second – they are big slow things that are hard to control and tend to require five people operating one machine. Third – they are a technical nightmare with so many characteristics and modifications that will make your head hurt. With that being said you can imagine how big of a train wreck a game that features real life tanks with their correct characteristics on historically correct WWII battlefields would be for me. Fortunately World of Tanks is not like that.

I do not mean it is not historically correct. On the contrary – everything you will see in the game was somewhere there around the World War II period. But the game is not what you would expect from a tank simulator. In fact – it is not really a simulator but rather a fun arcade version of one.

Customization and Progression

It is kind of hard to separate these two here so that is why I’m putting them together. As you might have guessed there are no races or classes to choose from in World of Tanks. Well, they are nations but the game is not nation locked so you can use tanks from more than one nations at the same time.

Once you start the game you will find yourself owning two tanks – one from each nation. Currently there are only two nations in the game – USSR and Germany but the developers promise more to come such as America, France, Britain and even Japan. So all the nations have one starting tank each. For Russia this is MS-1 which is also known as T-18 and for Germany we have the Leichttraktor. Both tanks are prototype pre-WWII machines and will serve as a base for your future improved battle equipment.

At the beginning you are not allowed to make much choosing – you pick one of the two proto-tanks and go into battle. I will cover the battle gameplay later so for now we just assume that you have completed your first battle and it is time to get back to the garage. After each battle no matter won or lost you receive two things – experience and credits. These will vary depending on if you won or lost the battle as well as your personal achievements on the battlefield but no matter what you have done – you progress. This is where the things get interesting. With the experience you will be able to upgrade your tank through a progression tree that will allow you to research new parts for your tank such as engines, barrels, suspensions, radios and turrets. Still these parts do not come freely – you will have to buy them with the credits that you earn. At the end of each tree a research for new model of tank or different war machine. When you research new models you will have to buy them the same way you do with the parts for your current tank. After you buy a new tank you do the same stuff all over again.

Apart from your first tank each new model will be researched this way. It sounds a little bit confusing progressing this way in the game but fear not – there is a tech tree that shows all the development routes you can take to your ultimate war machine. The new vehicles researchable from your first tank are four – two light tanks, a SPG(Self Propelling Guns/Howitzers/Artillery) and a tank destroyer. The tanks are pretty clear – eventually they will lead you to either heavy or medium tank at the end of the progression path. The difference between light, medium and heavy tank are the role they play in battle. Light tanks are usually fast scouting machines, the medium tanks are also fast but have better armor and heavier firepower and heavy tanks are slower but have the thickest armor and deal the most damage. The tank destroyers are kind of like tanks but they have larger attack range. The downside is that their side and rear armor is weaker compared to the heavy tanks and their barrels have limited moving capacity which means you will have to face the target to shoot at it. The SPGs have very weak armor but very large range and firepower. They can practically shoot anything down from half a map distance if they have the required intelligence on where to shoot. The different paths you can take form a pretty solid tank tree with 31 models for each nation. Each tank features a lot of upgrades and is either a pre-WWII, WWII, post-WWII or prototype model that really exists so there is a lot of stuff to give the tank geeks at least a few pleasurable moments.

There are a couple more things I have to say about the progression from purely game-system perspective. The first one is that the experience you receive after battle is two types – free experience and normal experience. The normal experience can be used to upgrade only the current tank while the free experience can be used to upgrade any machine you like. Of course the free experience received is very low in comparison to the normal experience. A question rises – what to do with normal experience when the tank is fully upgraded? Well – you can either convert it to free experience for some cash shop currency or you can use it to hasten the training of your tank’s crew. Here comes the second thing – the tank’s crew. Each tank has a separate crew that consists from two to five people. Each person has a position that he takes care of. While you battle your crew also gets more experienced at their jobs and do stuff around the tank better. You can also train them fast for cash shop currency or in-game money. Still it is kind of annoying that you must retrain your crew for a new vehicle and they lose their experience in the process. In my opinion it is better to stick with the new crew you are provided automatically with.

If I must give an honest mark for this section of the game I would give it about 9 out of 10. There are really a lot of stuff in the content but the progression is a little bit slow for my taste and there never seem to be enough money to get your next research tank right away.

Gameplay

The battles in World of Tanks are very well done. The control scheme is simple and easy to master – you drive your tank with WASD and control your turret with the mouse. You can also access sniper mode and artillery mode with shift and autolock a target with the right mouse button. The left mouse button stands for fire, of course. The steering is very smooth, I have not experienced any problems with it as well as the manual targeting. The auto-target mode takes a little bit more time for the turret to adjust to the right angle as it’s turning speed is fixed according to your tank and it’s gear. Don’t worry, the autotarget does not ruin the game as it is not always accurate and you can miss quite a lot using it. I believe it is only meant to be done while driving. With the sniper mode you can target precise parts of the enemy tank to take out. If you hit the gears the target will stop moving for example making it an easier target. You can also destroy other parts of the enemy tank but you must know that they will be repaired after some time so it is a good idea to aim for a killing blow at some point. The feel of the normal combat is pretty much like the one in Battlefield Heroes when you get into the tank but not so arcade and with more strategy and targeting involved.

The artillery also works good as you can target any part of the map with the special bird-eye targeting system that is exclusive for the SPGs. I like how the developers balanced these seemingly overpowered machines. There are two factors that you will have to have in mind while being an artillerist – the terrain and the visibility. The terrain is pretty much clear – your shells will hit objects that are between you and the target. They will fly over most of the stuff but a mountain in the middle of the map as well as building near the enemy tank can block even a flawlessly executed shot. You also have to have in mind that the tanks are not static objects on the map and that they move around or even – that they stop suddenly and change direction. They can even suddenly disappear while you are still targeting them. This is because you cannot see every tank on the whole map. You can see only tanks that have been spotted by your allies. To balance things even further the game uses the radio range from your tank upgrades as a value to determine which enemies spotted by your allies you can see according to the distance between you and them.

The battles are quite fast and fun. There is a lot of tactics involved in them as you are a deadman if you just rush into the enemy. You can either go in groups of several tanks and take other groups like that or you can hide in the bushes and ambush the enemy. Still if they get too close to you you will be spotted very fast. The same goes if you fire a shot so be wise when to uncover your self. The light tanks will usually work together with the SPGs and the tank destroyers – the first ones exploring and finding enemies, trying to stay alive as long as It takes for the heavy gun guys to target and shoot. It does not mean that you will not be able to take out enemy tanks on your own when playing light or medium tank but it just helps to have some support in the back.

I am a little disappointed in the game modes. The Normal Battles will take place with hitting the huge red button “Battle”. You will be transferred to a lobby when you will wait for other people to enter until the game starts automatically on a random battlefield. The game rooms fill quite fast – I have never waited for more than ten seconds for a game to begin even when I was the first one in the lobby. The battle is 15 versus 15 people and it is autobalanced which means that the power of the tanks in the different teams will be quite the same. The battle takes up to 15 minutes but it is usually over before the time is up. The annoying thing is that when you get killed – this is it. You get no respawns, no lives – you just die and your tank is stuck in the battle until either one team is completely wiped out or one of the teams capture the enemy base. Or if you are extremely unlucky – until the time goes out and the team with the most players alive is victorious. If the same number of players is alive in both teams then a draw is declared. The Recruit’s Battles are the same thing but there is a limit to what tank you can bring to them. The Training Battles are the same but you can choose a map and a time limit to your liking. The annoying part of in this is that the room master must put each and every tank individually into a team of his choosing.

After each battle you will have to repair your tank if it was destroyed. The money that come from a battle even if you are destroyed in the first second and have done nothing at all are more than the ones required for the repairs so you will not find yourself in a ditch there. You will also have to restock the ammunitions for your tank. There are usually two or three types of those that will cost differently according to the type. One of them is always cash shop ammo and it is slightly better than the ordinary stuff but they are not overpowered so it is not a dealbreaker.

There are all in all 7 maps where you can wage war and they are quite unique in size and environment. They are all real locations from World War II but I guess they have been downsized to keep the battles fast. Even now some of the maps are pretty big and when few players are left they would not find one another for quite some time.

The developers promised the involvement of infantry in the future(I really hope as playable too) and I suppose they will add more game modes and maps. Still for now I will give the game 7 out of 10 for gameplay because of the lack of diversity in the game modes as well as the waiting times.

Graphics and Sound

I must admit – the graphics of the game are quite good even on low settings. The models of the tanks are really close to the real stuff and the destructible environment gives you the feeling that you are driving something very powerful. I even did a little experiment – I ran the game and asked a friend of mine who is really into World War II warfare to identify the tanks he sees. He was very accurate and guessed right in 90% of the cases. He even pointed out when a machine was modified with a different barrel or turret. Also we both agreed that one of the Russian SPGs looked like an outdoor toilet on wheels. Anyway, the models and the rendering of the in-game objects is very good as well. The sky and the water looks beautiful. The trees look very good as well but when you are up-close you can see that some of the textures are not very good.

On the other hand the sound is perfect for me. I would like to see diffrent in-game music according your nation but the tracks right now do a very good work as well. They perfectly represent the tense spirit of the fight or the uneasy wait for the upcoming battle. My favorite tune in the game is when you have lost the battle which is kind of ironic. The voiceacting is quite good. They do not say much but what they do say they say it with the right feeling in the voice.

I will give 9 out of 10 for graphics and sound because of some awkward destruction animations and bad textures.

Cash Shop

Like it or not – this is a free to play game so the cash shop is the best way of making money in it. I had the privilege of experiencing the cash shop in this game for free. Of course it will all be wiped out after the beta so don’t worry – I will not be overpowered bastard when the game comes out for everyone. And even now I am not really overpowered and this is what I like in this game – the cash shop is really balanced. It is true that there are some tanks that can only be bought by cash shop currency but I like way they made sense out of it. The tanks you buy from the cash shop are only Trophy tanks that have either been given as a gift from one nation to another or have been captured in battle and converted. Currently there are 7 tanks purchasable by cash in the cash shop – 3 captured by Germany French tanks and 4 gifted to USSR by Great Britain. These tanks are also not the best tanks in the game but rather a mid-late game tanks. They are strong but they will not make you stronger than anyone else – you will just get them faster. Also there are no upgrades for these tanks so they are not part of any progression trees – you will still have to work hard to earn those. The other uses for the cash shop are converting cash shop money into in-game credits at a decent rate and the rest of the things I have already mentioned – training your tanks’ crew, converting tank experience into free experience and buying special ammo. These are perks but not big enough to unbalance the game.

I will give the cash shop 8 out of 10 because I think that there should be another way of converting tank XP into free XP as well or at least to transfer one crewmember from one tank to another without loss of experience.

Conclusion

I was really pleasantly surprised by World of Tanks. It is a game that I have not expected to be able to catch me within it’s grasp but somehow it managed it with lots of content, fun battles and progression, nice graphics and lovely sound. I think that this game is going to be improved even further and if you are a tank enthusiast you definitely have to check it out. Still there are a few things that should be cleared with time so I will give it 8 out of 10 as a final score.

Customization and Progression – 9/10
Gameplay – 7/10
Graphics and Sound – 9/10
Cash Shop – 8/10
Overall – 8/10